Chapter 5
Art Methodologies in Media E c ology
Matthew Fuller
Art is no longer only art. Its methods are recapitulated, ooze out and become
feral in combination with other forms of life. Art methodologies convey art's
capacities to enact a live process in the world, launching sensorial particles and
other conjunctions in ways and combinations that renew their powers of distur
bance and vision. Art methodologies are a range of ways of sensing, doing and
knowing generated in art that are now circulating more haphazardly, perhaps
less systematically, and requiring of a renewed form of understanding in order
to trace and develop them. Art methodologies are cultural entities, embodied
in speech, texts, sounds, behaviours and the modes of connection between
things that share and develop, work on, art's capacity of disturbance and the
multi-scalar engorgement of perception.
As art systems proliferate, sometimes clenching into magnificently puckered
dots, at other times unraveling into torrents of work and of life, art methodolo
gies shuttle back and forth between entities in art systems and other domains
with a certain range of freedoms, encountering and staging constraints. The
generation and circulation of art methodologies invokes a formation of art that
is not a conservative system pushing a named, trimmed and dealt with few up
the heights of a pyramid built on the mangled achievements of many others,
the classic paradigm, but a system that condenses and spews out moments of
relationality. This happens with no necessary connection to named entities
such as author, piece, project, owner, artist, provenance.
Art methodologies circulate, gain traction, shift, die off, amongst a more gen
eral flocculation of ideas, styles and modes of inflection. A diffusion is occurring
in which art methodologies can pop up unexpectedly, not even recognizing
themselves as art, indeed possibly not even having that filiation in a genealogi
cal sense, but connecting to it by means of arrival via a different phylogenetic
route, or move in a way for which the idea of such a tracking is ludicrous. Such
an understanding of art methodologies relies on an understanding of cultures
as living processes involving stability and diversification that assemble circula
tion vectors, hot, cooling and intermixing, driven by invention and mutation,
that act as pulsional zones for the circulation and invocation of signs and
dynamics. That is, art methodologies may exist at this scale, they might drive
cultures or be sucked along in their wake.
46
Dekuze, Guattari and the Production of the New
Cultures, media ecologies nrixed in with and passing through them, are con
veyors of heat, materials and intelligence that at once provide a means, with their
own particular rhythms, for the mix and conservation of modes and the multi.
scalar conveyance of potentially mutational effects and dynamics, that themselves
intermingle, block, and replicate dimensions of relationality, congealing as
events, medial entities and processes of subjectivation. They certainly exist in
and as the classically defined sense of media as systems for storage, processing
and distribution of cultural material, but also pass along without them.
Context
Some context is useful for describing this shift. One aspect might simply be the
massification of art education undergone in some parts of the world since the
middle of the twentieth century. To take the British Isles, if we assume that most
graduates from art schools since the 1960s are largely still alive that means
that there are several tens of thousands of people around with some kind of art
training. Clearly not all of them are now artists or designers in a way that is rec
ognized by art systems. What then happens to the ideas, ways of seeing the
world and doing things that art allows for and entrains? I am not interested
here in making an account of so-called 'transferable skills ', but more in how
accretions of cultural reflexes and modes of intensification moving through
populations, at microscopic or larger scales, invent their own means of circula
tion, mutation and alliance.1
Another contributing current is the context of art as popular culture. One
aspect would be the more systematic celebritization of art but another, more
interesting instance would be the TV series Jackass, mixing the precisely trau
matic end of art with bodies (i.e. that of Chris Burden) , with skate culture, and
the time-rhythm of TV comedy. A more simple example, the migration of art
methodologies into pop music is reasonably well charted, and more interest
ingly remains a serious zone of contention, but to account for the phenomena
it is necessary to do more than recognize the mapping of ideas and means from
one relatively stable cultural domain into another. What are described here as
possible contextualizing dynamics, are perhaps more adequately also under
stood as symptoms.
Equally, the circulation of art methodologies can be seen as intersecting
with and feeding off a more general reflexivity, self-observation woven into the
actions of the self. Here the entity functioning as a self may range from a pro
duction process, a dance move and its stability and variation, the repertoire of
an erotic subculture at sizes scalable from the sub-individual to massifying level
or a cybernetically self-monitoring national corpus or a personal fitness regime.
Aesthetically charged entities and modes move through social and communica
tive formations, providing many other kinds of entity and dynamic with their
justification and metre.2
,
Art Methodol,ogies in Media Ecology
47
In this way art methodologies as an idea is too fragile, or its scope too
small, to conform to the totalizing ambitions of movements demanding
the complete subsumption of everyday life by art as characterized by, amongst
others, the later Situationist International. What is described here is not a
classic takeover bid but a shifting and opening of the permutational matrix of
influences and possibilities between intersecting fields, the registration of an
apparent torsion in cultural dynamics releasing the expressiveness of
insubordination. 3
Indeed, the proliferation of art methodologies into other forms of life cannot
simply be understood to be good, democratic, enabling or humane in the way
that everything is supposed to be participatorily dressed up nowadays; or simply
grindingly joyful and Christian in the mode of a 'don't worry be happy' brand
of Spinozism. Art methodologies share part of the wider question of knowledge
stemming from their contribution to the curse fingered by Paul Rabinow when
he says, of the 'anthropological problem', that, 'anthropos is that being who
suffers from too many logoi' (2003: 6) . (This is to place surplus consciousness
as a foundational condition, not as a calculable excess figured as emancipatory
from or compensatory to social position.) Art is a means of alienation, a pre
cious source of self-mutilation. Anthropos is a residue and shaper of evolutionary
forces, and one of its subcategories is man. Man, is a pathological animal,
(Nietzsche) a sick animal, (Burroughs) a plague (Margulis) that is also traversed,
used as a nutrient sac of protein-bearing pus or as a breeding ground for numer
ous other sicknesses, language and culture being virulent amongst them. To
speak of art methodologies requires a way of recognizing culture that is beyond
man. We should be attentive to its particular traits and capacities but not get
stuck in its skin.
In his discussions of Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze sets up the term 'Method' for
particular attention (Deleuze, 1988; 1992) . Method is the means by which
Spinoza fabricates a machine capable of travelling across the universe and at
the same time, dig into or suffuse microcosmic scalar realities, allowing them to
be composable, alienable from common sense, into the realm of geometry and
love. Methods are procedures, regimes, tricks on the self, which allow us to get
beyond everyday perception and the rule of the commonplace.
What is Phiwwphy ? expands this vocabulary of method by describing the
three modes, variations, variabl.es and varieties that the book's three planes, or
'daughters of chaos' philosophy, science and art produce as they cut, each in
their different way, through the arcs of life, of chaos (Deleuze and Guattari,
1994: 208) . Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on sensual perception in art is
immensely productive as one p arameter of a fine speculative matrix, but it
misses out many other kinds of dynamics running through both contemporary
art practices and, for the context of this text, the art methodologies that run
through, parallel to or away from them. Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari's
work provides useful resources in describing art methodologies within and
beyond art systems.
48
Deleuz.e, Guattari and the Production of the New
Variations are precisely what Eric Alliez produces in his striking commentary
on VVhat is Phil,osojJhy ? They are a multiplication of resonances within an
evolving conceptual domain: in the way that a body builder rips muscle in order
to allow the tissue to increase its density and capacity, fibers multiplying,
intensifying the capacity of others, philosophy rips thought, nurturin g and
anticipating, feasting on its growth. Variabl,es are entities that are recognizable as
being independently meaningful given the construction and adoption of a par
ticular scientific perspectival system. Slowing down a sound in order to map it
as a waveform; designing an instrument with sensors responsive to certain parti
cles; or trimming or extending the lengths of a limb or tail-feather in order to
match these variables against others, such as measured patterns of walking, or
mate selection. Such variables are always rinsed out from a more inchoate gesta
tive background. Chiming, not necessarily concording, with figures such as
Brouwer and Poincare, Deleuze and Guattari extend the classical mathematical
formulations of intuitionism. Varieties, produced in art, are dimensions arising
from .the intersection of art, as it slices across the fecund turmoil of life, which
partially autonomize sensation as a process of being, and through this autono
mization, allow it to return with greater ferocity and passion into the world.
In VVhat is PhiwsofJhy ? Deleuze and Guattari's account of art lacks engagement
with art practices that do not have perception as their prime aim and mode or
indeed as a mode in which they can be adequately experienced or understood.
Interpretative approaches to art based on the primacy of affect can end up
smothering other kinds of dynamics which may be present, active and produc
tive. 4 With the ascendancy of one interpretative category, art's engagement
with technicity or other forms of intellect equally risk being obscured. Despite
the delimited scope of Deleuze and Guattari's figuration of art in VVhat is
Phil,osojJhy ? however, what it does provide is a vivid way of thinking through ideas
and practices as dynamic elements in manifold systems.5 Art provides a light
ning rod to sensations, a discipline for finding the means to allow sensation
to couple itself with a multiple form of materiality, that of the work, painting
or sculpture but it is also more than that. 6 Deleuze sets up as much in his earlier
extended meditations on sensation's interactions and inherence with logic
or mathematical figurations; sensation neVer goes uncomplicated and without
consequences (Deleuze,
1990; 1994) . When the pair's last book turns to
art's affiliations and resonances with ecology and oikos, in the chapter 'Percept,
Affect and Concept' the centre of gravity in the discussion becomes too
multiple to leave perception anchored as the ruling principle of art and a
whole universe of dynamics opens up to make their capacities felt. Sensation,
coupled with its resonance in space, in the capacities of behaviours, and
physical affordances becomes melodic, something that is built out of the inter
play between things and which produces them as things. Given an ecological
understanding of art, the idea of art as sole purveyor of the divided labour
of perception falls by the wayside. 7 Indeed, if art begins with the animal, the
.Art Methodologies in Media Ecolog;y
49
co-evolutionary coupling between organism and place, such a coupling also
requires something more than the vivid, gleeful and subtle account of the inter
fibrillic rush and curse of nature. The recognition of sensation by sensation
generates intelligence, melody itself instigates pattern finding, and reflexivity
is born. Ultimately, the book's own trajectory gives way to a recognition of the
kinds of indiscernability that the book's three arcs, art science and philosophy,
,
themselves give rise to. From this vantage point, it is possible to see that the
tracing of the three irreducible arcs is done so fastidiously, the better, by means
of them, to join together so much that is incommensurable and thus to make a
moire of their clean geometry. The three daughters of chaos are themselves just
as much an effect of the melody between them and the beings that come into
existence through and actualize these fields.
After the coupling of art with ecology (in 'Percept, Affect and Concept' ) it is
sensation's coupling with composition formed on the plane of aesthetics that
becomes of importance. The terrain of what art might be, in Deleuze and
Guattari 's reworking of it, expands somewhat: set off by the vividness of a phrase
or a figuration of the world, 'We become universes' (Deleuze, 1994: 1 69 ) .
Before it becomes a question of style however, amongst art's capacity of varia
tion, its ability to manufacture compounds of sensation, are discerned some
great types, varieties of variation: the vibration; the clinch or embrace; and with
drawal, division and distension. These mark spatial and sensual forces of
arrangement, the fluctuating distribution of closeness providing a moment of
sheer transit, or a gasp, a pause, a shudder that opens up thought and serenity
or the clenching that sends shocks from one element in the composition to
another (Deleuze, 1994: 1 68) . These figures occur later too. Revolutions do not
occur solely as a chartable series of political events, nor necessarily in their
structural or psychic denouement, but reside in the vibrations, clinches and
openings at the moment of their making (Deleuze, 1 994: 1 77) . In revolutions
at all scales becomings pile up to make cairns as way-finding marks for others.
(Can revolutions, like art entities, be said to embed persistent blocs of sensa
tions that are untimely? Does the intensity of a holy orgiastic roarer with the
livity of Abiezer Coppe always trump the betrayal of a Cromwell? ) . What is clear
'
is that these capacities, for variation attributed to art are recapitulated, trans
posed into other forms oflife: buzzing, breaking and conjugating in composition.
This typology, this grammar of conjunction, differentiation and resonance
moves across works, across bodies of work and disciplines, and beyond into
forms oflife, Following this outward trajectory of vibrations, clinches and open
ings it is possible to give a quick idea of the scope of other art methodologies,
I do not want to present a full bestiary, but to set1out a few observable kinds:
Second-order memetics. Memetics is concerned with analytic identification of
coherent units of culture (at scales ranging from phonemes to religions) , and
the dynamics by which they mutate or find themselves conserved. It uses the
50
Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New
tools of evolutionary theory to design metrics for tracking the longevity,
fecundity and variability of such cultural elements. Second order memetics
adds to this the insights gained by the recognition of the observer. Second order
memetics is done live, as something itself susceptible to memetic analysis but
also subjecting any 'coldness' of analysis to the torsion of multiple inherence in
the cultural processes it recognizes as being fugitive, mutational and wild.
Perception dilation. Art methodologies are sensual, but they also act on the
material of sensation. Ducts of thought are engorged with sensation. Nerve
bearing surfaces and cavities are subject to thickening and scraping, they sprout
sweat, call forth tongues, carnality is encountered immediately, an immediate
hamm er blow to the whole body, but also slowed, distended, stretched to points
beyond their capacity to be borne without being added to . Whether they are
austere or muscular and liquid, hypertrophic and maddened such art method
ologies, like love, generate extended fields of carnality operating across different
scales and registers of matter.
The unready. Art methodologies are not necessarily 'ready' . Art combines a
transversal handiness, with universal cacliliandedness: a capacity to get stuff
done to make something happen without the encumberance or guiding hand
of prerequisite skill or the right equipment or training. Art's angelic punkness
is awkward and ravenous, insisting on the power to release its refined, curious
ignorance in places where knowledge is securely lodged, spreading out its
nervous system to catch the ripples of unheard of suns. Tools and aesthetic
dynamics are opened up to objects and processes to which they are not stand
ardized. If philosophy is a meta-discipline, art methodologies open up the space
for a meta-antidiscipline that is broken, twitchy and brilliant.
Producing times. Art subjects itself to testing in real life, in real time but also in
the time of art - a temporal dimension in which one is in dialogue with both
'what is no longer possible' and what has not yet been done, with resources
from objects, traditions, ideas and waste distributed - sinking into and emerg
ing from time. Such time is also related to the experiential thickness of carnality.
Art stages the occurrence of things, their revelation or palpability in a waywhich
resists their easy ability to be known. That is, art insists upon the staging of an
engagement with it that includes the simultaneity, that is potentially endlessly
maintained, of all stages of anticipation, delay and cognisance.
Feeding a this inw a that. Aesthetic circuits and procedures, from an instant
neural reflex to a method, from a certain glance to a particular device, establish
themselves as scalar entities and dynamics within the compositional dynamics
of life. They set out a field to which they refer, patches of colour, repeated
movement, attention to certain streams of information, the idiosyncracies of a
skill or a set of optics, habituations and patterns are formed. Given this, a clus
tered set of art methodologies can be seen in the transposition of such dynamics
where the displacement of reference becomes a displacement of processing
and modulation. Feeding a this into a that refuses the trivial arbitrary mapping
Art Methodol.ogi,es in Media Ecol.og;y
51
of some media o r electronic art, made almost inevitable by the easiness of
digital media. Instead it engages precisely with the politics of parsing and
the sensational universes of transformation.
If the above are indicators towards the recognition of art methodologies in the
wild it follows that the proposal here is not to set up a possible hermeneutics in
which a certain phrase, gesture, mark or breath can be recognized as providing
an articulation space for say, the moments of intensive non-thought which
abstract expressionism aimed at physically epitomizing; the quick ironic per
ception of figures, whose recomposition as mass-reproducible drawings aimed
at sticking a knife in the guts of a society that is equally as rancid as oneself, typi
fied by say, George Grosz. Such precipitations from art clearly do occur and are
valuable and productive, but these are not things that I want to track as a matter
of priority and in part because there is no inherent need for them to occur
'first' in art. It might be more interesting to also look for isomorphisms of meth
ods in art occurring ex natura.
·
In and out of art
One of the ways in which it is useful to set out such a question is in relation to
the navigation or creation of the boundary betw'een art and non-art. This is a
domain which is buzzing, engaged in oscillations which are at ti.mes crackling
backwards and forwards so fast that they are indiscernible, ruptured or irrele
vant, at others in a rigid tick-tocking and apportioning of function when it
seems all that counts is the process and mechanisms of demarcation. These dif
ferent regimes that set up pattern finding routines, or rinse out elements
containing substances above a certain threshold, provided a key point of refer
ence for the artist and acute theorist of art -Alan Raprow. Deleuze and Guattari's
lt'hat is Phil.osaphy ? ends with the remark that art is always dependent upon,
if not inherent in, non-art. Whilst its set of scalar references is different,
in Raprow's collection of essays and other texts, The Blurring ofArt and Life, one
of the key poles of activity is this flickering negotiation of art and non-art.
Compare the following as sample statements: in the survey text, 'Experimental
Art' of 1966 Raprow states, 'This acceptance as art, no matter how late it comes,
is in my view the goal' (of experimental actions) ( 1993: 77) . In the 'Manifesto '
of the same year Raprow writes, 'The task of the artist is to avoid making art of
any kind'
(81 ) . It is of no interest to use such statements to posit a possible
inconsistency in Raprow's work. What does garner interest is the means by
which this tension is set up and navigated, by a tb-ing and fro-ing betw'een art
and non-art. What Raprow is after in both of these texts and in others, each
following distinct trajectories or gambling on the play of experimental forces, is
to set in motion a condition in which life, or experience, can be heightened.
Indeed, 'Experimental art can be an introduction to right living, and after that
Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New
52
introduction art can be bypassed for the main course' (Kaprow, 225) . This
continual back and forward across the boundary of art and non-art knots the
fields together without caring for primacy in whether one grips or penetrates
the other but revelling in the interplay of forces, codings and tensions that
their interplay makes possible.
If one trajectory of art is that it frees itself first from God, then from nature,
then from retinality, it also uses these opportunities to experiment with open
ing up voids and disarticulations within and from art itself. There are now
multiple art worlds, or universes of reference which are not and canno t be
boiled down to one set of terms, dynamics, infra-structures and art systems.
None of this should be taken as implying that they are inherently of interest;
what is important is that there is now a fundamental dissensus about what art is,
where it is located, who activates it and in what ways it is spoken about. There is
for instance an art system devoted to science-art collaboration in the United
Kingdom that is almost entirely fabricated by one biomedical public relations
fund; or a range of counter institutions throughout northern Europe devoted
to electronic art, a genre which is rarely allowed in to other sections of the art
world; there are commercial art sectors which are unable to recognize or even
sense anything much beyond the end of their own always terminally involuted
nervous systems; and there are immense pointless resources of hope poured
into art as a quasi-mystical pyramid scheme.
Part of this dissensus is in the ravenous nature of art, that it takes on the
world, but also its ironization. Such a move produces a familiar paradox: the
readymade allowed anything to be taken as art, but it also allows art to be taken
as anything, any old crap. A cleaner working in a gallery accidentally demol
ishes an installation and tucks it away into the rubbish. Everyone howls with
delight, the news comics of course, but n0-0ne more so than the artists.
And this is one point at which art methodologies detach themselves from art
systems. Art systems, the familiar media ecologies of gallery, press-release, col
lection, blurb, statement, magazines, reviews, prices, festivals, sponsorships and
so on, mesh with but do not subsume art methodologies. The fact that art is the
equivalent of shit, can be set up as an authorized relationship both securely wal
lowing in its own wonderful ephemerality and as a gormless incarnation of the
most valuable-per-square-millimetre single object in the world. Shit that is more
diamond encrusted than a crown is the happy horizon of much contemporary
art, but it misses what is leaking out sideways from the two poles of this outworn
paradox.
The dissensus of art is in part what makes such a mobility possible, but it is
also something inherent to art as a set of internally differentiating and symbi
otic tendencies and capacities. Deleuze writes of the way in which, 'the eye,
having abandoned its haptic function and become optical subordinated itself
to the tactile as a secondary power' (2003: 127) . His writing on Bacon roils with
shifting alliances and migrations of senses and material. The optical dismantles
Art Methodologies in Media Ecol.ogy
53
the manual and the haptic relaxes the relation between eye and hand, colour
and line .
The corporealities that ar t invents allow subtle filiations an d perversions to
run their fibers through the painter, the user of the work,
the organs, modes
and entities that art systems grow by, and ultimately, what sprouts from them,
and by these means art exceeds its own organization. Eye, hand, canvas, brain,
paint, light, confluences sprawl and fight, egg each other on, thrown together
or out of whack by the use of photographs, sitters, a piece of land, a jar of flow
ers. Wille m de Kooning's later paintings are well known for their way with
colour and the acrobatic movement of their labile juicy brush, but also for the
question of whether his gradual contraction of Parkinson's disease during their
production reduced him to a mann erist assemblage of learned muscle move
ments, merely making twitches amongst paint placed ready for him on the
palette. At what level do we situate an art methodology? A residual nervous tick,
a spasm? With some justification, Deleuze and Guattari refuse the pictures pro
duced by the mad or by children a properly named place as art. But I would
suggest that the categorical edge they set down is too sharp. Art methodologies
allow a perspective that is 'beneath' this scale focusing instead on the popula
tions of reflexive entities that traverse 'works ' , bringing them to life, but also
sometimes exceeding them or being born there.
Attention
One such art methodology that Kaprow used in order to make sense of this
boundary transition between art and non-art is attention. Recognizing that
'Attention alters what is attended' (Kaprow, 1993: 236) . Ka.prow mobilized the
phenomenon of the observer, a state of recursive interaction within a system as
an everyday technique runnin g at different moments, according to different
rhythms through both art and other forms of life . Attention was both part of
life , but could also be performed, attended to itself, with another person, with
objects and in relation to a media system such as video and thus folded into
other circuits of attention. Attention was something that could be mobilized in
daily life in actions such as hand washing. The method was to carry out such an
action with the coding, the condition, that what is so enacted be parsed, paid
attention, to think about its full set of interrelations with the world, and the act
so reflected upon, as it occurs, as a sensual and thoughtful process.
Kaprow's technique of paying attention, partly as an engagement with the
ideas ofJohn Cage has its roots in Natural Philesophy, certain aspects of Zen
and its plunge into mundanity, Stoicism, every moment at which one tries to
calm or ex<:ite or sensitize or flay consciousness to the point that it can receive
the fullness at many scales, of what is occurrin g around and through it. It is the
cheapest, most available of perceptual modification: an . attempt to forestall
54
Deleuze, Guattari and the Producticn of the New
humans' propensity to 'inattentional blindness' (Mack and Rock, 2000) . In the
work of Gary Snyder the same figure, wiping away grease from the hands after
work, appears as an intermediate, and hence very rich moment. Accidentally
the mind opens to a 'calm and clarity', when 'glancing up at the passing clouds'
(Snyder, 24) . Paying attention is to ask in what way is it possible to set up fields
or domains of resonance with others? (animals, social processes, visualization
systems, soap, water, hands) as ijfor the first time, at which point everything
needs to be taken into account but also with the knowledge of practice, of tacit
everydayness.
Art methodologies do not necessarily endure as blocs of sensation. More
wraithlike, they also disappear, vapourize, become inadequate, but also emerge
out of sensation's doubling, the recognition or apprehension of melody to
be found in attention and elsewhere. The question is not necessarily as with
larger assemblages of entities and dynamics, to find ways of making them
more incisive, disrupting and revealing. Such things are too substantial, too
coherent at multiple scales to qualify simply as art methodologies. However,
art methodologies will traverse from one scalar reality or set of selves or relation
of dimensionality across to others and, knowing this, allow them to be
worked on. Art methodologies in the wild, without a line back to more endur
ing entities, from subjectival aggregations to institutions or economies of
whatever degree of fictivity are inherently difficult to mark down, to track or
to prescribe with a uniform metric. Art methodologies are out, and that is
perhaps enough.
Notes
1
'Transferable skills' is educational audit jargon for something you learn by doing
one thing that you can also use for another thing. For instance, if you can walk to
the photocopier, you can also walk to the bookshelf.
2 Scott Lash and John Urry note in a similar vein that at a time when 'aesthetic
reflexivity comes to pervade social processes' (1993: 54) there is a greater and
more 'democratic' (1993: 50) distribution of symbol systems allowing for various
observers to suggest that 'postmodemism is in effect the generalization of aesthetic
modernism to, notjust an elite, but the whole of the population' (1993: 1 33) .
3 See also Fuller, 2006 .
4 There are a number of examples to be found in recent theoretical work where the
renewed respectability of relegating art simply to the domain ofaffect also becomes
an acceptable means of effectively refusing to acknowledge the complex politics '
ofwork which might indeed involve affect as becomings, but which multiply them,
making their own becomings of becoming that are coupled with other dimen
sions of relationality, not being reducible to them.
5 Theirs is also a figuration that is historically free-floating, important in that it
releases the power of untimeliness, of refusing the lock-step of the one thing after
A.rt Methodologi,es in Media Ecology
55
another. Indeed, art as a media system that includes the function of storage,
'preserves' (Deleuze, 1994: 163) forming barricades of percepts and affects against
time, or constellations that leak through it, setting up a reserve that is outside time
or more accurately, in consciously evental time.
6
Deleuze brilliantly formulates the former approach in his book on Bacon (Deleuze,
7
For a related discussion on art and ecology see Fuller, 2008.
2003) .
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